Another Starlink Earth Station: IXAfrica Data Center In Nairobi, Kenya

The second Kenyan data center (IXAfrica Nairobi) I've visited with a large Starlink presence. IXAfrica is on Nairobi's outskirts on Mombasa Road and is pretty damn difficult to find as I and the taxi driver learned to our dismay. 😃 Starlink normally requires 20 degrees of line of sight in all directions for its earth stations. A condition clearly violated here. I suspect Starlink is using free space lasers to transmit traffic to satellites high enough in the sky to reach this limited-line-of-sight facility. From my point of view all this talk about Starlink building a parallel Internet infrastructure qualifies as nonsense. It is just another niche ISP using a different and bandwidth-limited Last Mile infrastructure to reach end users. No revolution. Just hype.

Photo of the Starlink Teleport at IX Africa Data Center In Nairobi


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